WAYS 102 - Real Teachers Please Stand Up - Lynn Hall Fall 2021

Fall 2021 Essay #2 from Dr. Lynn Hall

You are writing an essay to "document arguments" on education reform.  This is NOT an argumentative essay - DON'T take a side/stand! Your job is to "map the arguments around a topic".  In order to do this, you must find a minimum of three "scholarly secondary sources" that cover arguments and counterarguments on your topic.

Deadlines:

Step 1: Topic Analysis

Step 2: Choose a database

Decide whether you need a:

• General Database that covers lots of disciplines.
  • The quick search box on the library home page
  • Academic Search Complete
• Or a focused database that narrows in to the sources for just that discipline
  • On the library home page, click on "choose databases by subject and type"
  • Choose the subject and type of sources you want and see what databases are suggested.

for this assignment, a focused database will be more effective because you need discipline specific scholarly articles.

Step 3: Search the database effectively

• Use the four main search techniques
  • AND - to connect different ideas 
    • standards and education and federal
  • ( OR ) - to contain synonym in a group to be searched together 
    • standards and education and (federal or state)
  • quotation marks - to keep words together that express a single idea
    • "standardized testing" and government
  • Wildcard character - to catch multiple endings of a word.
    • ("educational standards" or "common core") and (state or federal) and (govern* or politic*)
• Use the limiters on the left side of the results lists to hone in on useful items, e.g.
  • Recent
  • Articles from Academic Journal
  • in English

Step 4: Evaluate your results and revise your search as necessary

Step 5: Retrieve the articles you choose

A Periodical is anything that is published regularly and includes newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, as well as some less well-known categories.  You will be required by faculty to use articles from peer-reviewed journals in your academic work.  What does that mean?  How do you know that what you are finding is acceptable?

• name of the periodical (journal, bulletin, quarterly, review...)
• more pages in the article than in a magazine article
• abstract present in the article (not just the database record)
• author affiliation given
• presence of a bibliography or references

And how do you find them in the first place?  The best way is to use a database designed to locate scholarly articles in your field of interest.

1. Try a title or keyword search
2. Some databases have a list of suggested subject words on the initial results page. Look at them and copy the useful ones. If there is no list, then look at a number of potentially useful records and copy down words and phrases from the "subject" or "descriptor" area of single record. Some databases provide a thesaurus of terms which can lead to broader, related, or narrower terms you may not have thought of.
3. Go back to the search screen and search BY SUBJECT/DESCRIPTOR using the words you learned about as a result of your first search.
4. Be sure to connect search terms correctly using the following techniques

• Boolean connectors
  • AND connects different concepts and narrows a search: Fish AND chips
  • OR, with parentheses, combines synonyms/related terms and broadens a search: Fish AND (chips OR fries)
• Use quotation marks for phrases: Fish AND (chips OR "french fries")
• Use the asterisk as a wildcard character to retrieve variations on a common stem: educat* retrieves educate, education, educating, educated, etc. Very useful for capturing plurals